Food, and some Other Stuff

5 Minutes of Funk

As some of you have probably noticed, I haven’t actually been able to write in the past couple of weeks. One set of my days off that I took another trip down to NYC to see Modest Mouse. We DID manage to get in lots of cool food and drink stops (some of which you may have seen on Instagram), so not getting to write was more than worth it. However, the previous week and this past week I’ve just been working pretty nonstop. To make a very long a frustrating story short, we’re hilariously understaffed right now. When you’re working 65 hours a week in a high-stress situation, behaving like a normal human being tends to fall by the wayside, let alone cooking and writing projects outside of work. Last week, I just happened to have a work project that fit into the 52 Weeks of Cooking Challenge, but I barely had enough time take a photo and submit it to Reddit on Sunday afternoon. This week hasn’t been much better in terms of long working hours, I hit my full 40 in just three days, but I’ve actually had time to cook and write and I even had a work project that helped me along!

Bounding into the second half of this year’s cooking challenge, our theme is fermentation. Every culture across the world and through time has at least some tradition of fermented products, some of which are starting to make their way into the American edible landscape. One of my favorites of these funky, delights is kimchi. In America we see kimchi in a very narrow view, mostly just fermented cabbage and radishes that is either spicy or less spicy. However, in Korean tradition, kimchi can refer to a wide array of pickled and fermented vegetables, usually containing some kind of seafood product. With an abundance on local cabbages and vegetables available at the beginning of the summer, I embarked on my first foray into making a kimchi as close to a traditional style as I could.

Since I had never made kimchi this way before, I used the recipes from the folks at Food52 as a starting point, then kind of adjusted based on what we actually had available. That recipes ended up looking something like this

The top part is actually another recipe for coffee ice cream I was working on, ignore that.

What it boils down to is LOTS of veggies. My mix was mostly Nappa cabbage, with various radishes, greens and scallions from local farms. Salt is a key player here, but dried shrimp and a Korean chili powder provide the signature flavor that traditional kimchi is known for.

The shrimp and chili powder are ground into a paste with garlic and ginger, then mixed with all the vegetable matter. After that, it’s a matter of letting bacteria do it’s work. I left mine in a dark basement, lightly covered to keep out dust, for 40 days (just a little more than 5 minutes of funk). At the end, you’re left with this:

Part soft, part crunch. A little bit of spice, a whole lotta funk. I’d say that this batch of kimchi has carried on my standing record of not really knowing what I’m doing and having things come out really awesome anyway.

While kimchi is great on it’s own, where it really shines is when you add to other foods. Replacing sauerkraut with kimchi can make one hell of a Reuben, and it brings your leftover fried rice to an entirely greater level. Me? I took inspiration from Roy Choi’s Kogi Dog.

All-beef dog, sesame mayo, kimchi. It’s kind of impressive how dressing up a hotdog just a little bit can turn it into something spectacular.

Since kimchi is so incredibly subjective as to how you want to to come out, I would highly suggest starting with the Food52 recipe, and adjusting it as you see it